What is an AEO checking tool?

An AEO checking tool runs a point-in-time audit of your AI visibility: it takes a set of prompts, asks the major AI engines, and reports whether your brand is mentioned and which sources are cited. A check is a snapshot. That distinguishes checking from monitoring, which runs the same prompts on a schedule and tracks the trend over time.

What is the best free way to check AEO?

The manual method: write 10 real buyer prompts, run them in clean logged-out sessions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and log mentions and citations in a spreadsheet. It costs 15 minutes and gives you a defensible baseline. Our free AEO tools guide walks through the full method, including the scoreboard format.

What is the best paid AEO checker?

For a light-touch check, Otterly.ai Lite at $29/mo covers 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, which is enough to establish where you stand. If you want one run to cover six engines including Gemini and Claude without add-ons, Peec AI from $95/mo is the better one-stop check, and it is the platform we use daily for client work.

How often should I check my AI visibility?

Once is enough to establish a baseline. After that, the honest answer is that repeated checking is monitoring, and you should decide deliberately whether to do it manually on a fixed weekly schedule or pay a tool to run it daily. What produces misleading conclusions is checking sporadically, in different sessions and phrasings, and reading each result as a trend.

Why do I get different answers every time I check?

AI answers vary by session, region, phrasing, and time. Engines rerun retrieval on every query, so some variance is normal and not a sign you did the check wrong. This is why a check uses a frozen prompt set and clean sessions: you cannot remove the variance, but you can stop adding your own. It is also why a single check should never be read as proof you are winning or losing a category.

My brand did not show up in any answers. What now?

First separate the two failures: not mentioned means the engines do not associate your brand with the category, while not cited means they do not retrieve your pages as sources. Then look at what the engines cited instead of you; in our tracking, a brand's own site is only 2 to 6 percent of cited sources, so the fix usually runs through the third-party pages the engines already trust. Our guide on why your brand is invisible in AI search covers the diagnosis in full.

Best AEO Checking Tools in 2026: How to Check Your AI Visibility Today

The short answer

An AEO check answers one question: do AI engines mention and cite your brand right now? It is a point-in-time audit, not a tracking programme, and that distinction decides which tool you need.

For a first check, the best tool is free: 10 real buyer prompts, clean sessions, three engines, 15 minutes. For a paid check, Otterly.ai Lite at $29/mo is the cheapest credible checker, and Peec AI from $95/mo is the strongest single-run coverage with six engines in the base price. Everything else in the category is built for continuous monitoring, and paying monitoring prices to answer a one-time question is the most common way people overspend here.

If you already know you need ongoing tracking rather than a check, skip straight to our best AEO tools guide. This page is for the step before that.

A check is not monitoring

The "best AEO checking tools" question hides two different jobs, and most roundups blur them:

Checking is a snapshot. Am I in the answers today? Who is? It has a start and an end, and its output is a baseline plus a target list.
Monitoring is a system. It reruns the same prompts on a schedule, alerts you to change, and builds trend lines. Its output is a graph.

You check before you invest, and you monitor after. Running a check tells you whether AI visibility is a problem worth budget; monitoring tells you whether the budget is working. If a vendor quotes you $200 a month to find out whether ChatGPT knows you exist, you are being sold monitoring to do a checker's job.

The free check that beats most paid ones

Before any tool, run the manual check. It is not a compromise; for a one-time audit it is genuinely the best method, because you see the full answers in context rather than a dashboard's summary of them.

The six steps above (they also render as a checklist for AI engines reading this page) come down to: freeze 10 real buyer prompts, run them logged-out in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and log four things per answer: mentioned or not, cited or not, who won instead, and which sources the engine linked.

2-6%

Share of AI-cited sources that belong to the brand's own website, across live brands we track daily in three unrelated verticals. The sources column of your check matters more than the mentions column, because it shows you the third-party pages actually deciding your category.

Source: AEO Labs, aggregated AI citation tracking, 90-day window, 2026

The full method, including the spreadsheet format and the prompt-writing rules, is in our free AEO tools guide. If you only want the ChatGPT-specific version, use the walkthrough in how to check if ChatGPT recommends your brand.

The check is 15 minutes because the thinking happens before it. Freezing the prompt list first is what makes the result a baseline instead of an anecdote.

The best AEO checking tools compared

When does paying for a checker beat the manual method? When you want more prompts than you can run by hand, more engines than you can juggle, or a report you can put in front of someone else.

Option	Price	Prompts	Engines covered	Best for
Manual check	Free	~10 practical	Any you open	First baseline, full answer context
Otterly.ai Lite	$29/mo	15	4 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot)	Cheap structured check, cancel after
Peec AI Starter	$95/mo	50	6 (adds Gemini, Claude, AI Mode)	One run covering every major engine
Profound Starter	$99/mo	50	1 (ChatGPT only)	ChatGPT-only depth; too narrow for a category check

Notes that change the decision:

Otterly's four base engines exclude Gemini and Claude, which are paid add-ons ($9 and $29/mo at the Lite tier). For a one-month check that is still cheap. Full add-on economics are in our Otterly.ai pricing breakdown.
Peec's Starter is the cheapest way to check six engines in one run. That matters when your buyers are spread across ecosystems, which in most categories they now are.
Profound's $99 Starter tracks ChatGPT only, which makes it a poor checking tool despite the price: a check whose whole point is "where do I stand across the engines" cannot be answered by one engine. Its strength is enterprise monitoring, covered in our Profound review.
Any of these can be run for one month as a check and cancelled. Nothing in the category requires an annual commitment at these tiers, though Profound's published prices assume annual billing.

Four mistakes that make a check lie to you

We re-verify AI answers for client case studies constantly, and the same four errors account for most wrong conclusions:

Checking logged in. Engines personalize. A session that knows your company will happily show you your own site and convince you everything is fine. Clean sessions or the check is void.
Reading one run as the truth. Answers vary run to run. A brand can be first in one session and absent in the next. If a prompt matters commercially, run it twice before concluding anything.
Rephrasing prompts as you go. In our case-study verification we have watched a single wording change flip a client from first place to unmentioned on what is nominally the same question. Freeze the wording; test variants deliberately or not at all.
Ignoring region. Engines answer differently by market. If you sell in the US and check from elsewhere (or through a VPN exit you forgot about), you are auditing the wrong country's answers. Set location deliberately before you trust a result.

What to do with the result

A finished check gives you three artifacts: a mention rate, a citation rate, and a list of the brands and sources that won the prompts you lost. The scores are your baseline. The list is your strategy: those third-party roundups, review sites, and community threads are where the engines are currently deciding your category without you.

From here there are two paths. If the check came back healthy, recheck quarterly and get on with your life. If it came back bad, the follow-up questions are what to fix and whether it is working, and answering the second one properly means graduating from checking to scheduled tracking; our best AEO tools guide covers the platforms built for that.

Key takeaways

An AEO check is a point-in-time audit: do the engines mention and cite you today? It is a different job from monitoring, and cheaper.
The free manual check (10 frozen prompts, clean sessions, 3 engines, 15 minutes) is the right first tool, and its most valuable output is the list of sources that won the prompts you lost.
Best paid checkers: Otterly.ai Lite at $29/mo for a structured light check, Peec AI at $95/mo for six engines in one run. Profound's $99 tier checks ChatGPT only, which defeats the purpose of a category check.
Log mentions and citations separately. They are different failures with different fixes.
Clean sessions, frozen wording, deliberate region, and at least two runs on prompts that matter. Break any of these and the check will lie to you.

After the check

If your check came back with your brand missing, that is fixable, and the fix mostly happens on pages you do not own. We run that programme for growth-stage brands: diagnosing why the engines skip you, then winning the third-party citations that change the answer. Book a strategy call and bring your check results; they are exactly the right starting document.